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Message Digest
Volume 29 : Issue 56 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: US school district spied on students through webcams, court told
Re: Pay phone nostalgia
Re: Fonts and Editors
Re: US school district spied on students through webcams, court told
Re: Pay phone nostalgia
Re: Pay phone nostalgia
Re: US school district spied on students through webcams, court told
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Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:36:23 -0600 (CST)
From: Robert Bonomi <bonomi@mail.r-bonomi.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: US school district spied on students through webcams, court told
Message-ID: <201002240236.o1O2aNU9003237@mail.r-bonomi.com>
In article <zsidnVsoa7a97h3WnZ2dnUVZ_rednZ2d@posted.nuvoxcommunications>,
>***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> I'm both surprised and fascinated by the ways that technology
> changes society, and especially by the fact that humans seem to have
> a blind spot when it comes to seeing change coming.
>
> The cameras that appeared in cell phones a few years back enabled
> teenagers to take X-rated pictures of themselves and to share them
> with their friends: in theory, that's no different than the
> capability of the earliest Kodak camera, but in practice it cuts out
> the middleman - the film developer -
Of course, Ed Land, of Polaroid fame, did that decades before cell phone
camareas existed.
> ... and so encourages more abuse. Using a webcam by remote control
> is different: AFAIK, there's no capability to turn cell-phone
> cameras on by remote control.
>
> I don't want to have a debate about the usefullness of "social
> contracts". Aside from the fact that they are the Holy Grail of
> certain political camps, long experience, over hundreds of years,
> has shown that there are some things people should not be allowed to
> do, even by their own free will.
>
> * You can't sell yourself into slavery, whether you want to or not.
Last I knew, "Indentured Servitude" was legal.
> * You can't hire someone to commit a crime.
Sure you can. It happens regularly. You just can't "enforce" the
contractual arrangement if they renege on it. <grin>
***** Moderator's Note *****
IANALB I think the only thing that's currently even close to
Indentured Servitude is a military enlistment (at least in the U.S.),
and any contract for personal services must be made by adults:
parents can not "indenture" their children. Of course, slavery is not
a contractual arrangement, since the penalty for breaking a contract
cannot be death or maiming.
I said "you can't hire someone to commit a crime" in a social and (I
hope) legal context, not a physical one. It is illegal to entice
another to violate the law by promise of reward, ergo you "can't" do
it. People may choose to flaunt the law, but hiring someone to commit
a crime is not a "contractual arrangement": it's another crime.
But, as I said, I don't want to get into a debate about Social
Contracts. The point I was trying to make is that an inferior
government entity, such as a school district, cannot require students
(or their parents) to surrender their fundamental rights in order to
attend school. If students at a certain school are required to use
laptops provided by the school, those students still retain their
constitutional right of privacy, no matter what the school's rules
are are what "contracts" anyone signed.
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:06:45 -0800
From: Sam Spade <sam@coldmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Pay phone nostalgia
Message-ID: <WQ%gn.12110$Ab2.2356@newsfe23.iad>
PV wrote:
> hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
>
>> I don't think people minded paying the 50c for a local call.
>
> You would be very, very wrong. Payphones as a market pretty much
> destroyed themselves, cellphones just helped a bit.
>
> As soon as COCOT "money trap" phones started to appear, they were no
> longer trustworthy as a whole, because sometimes the COCOT operators
> worked very hard to make their phones look like telco phones, to the
> point of sometimes using RBOC housings and signage.
Ah yes, some of the COCOT folks bought WE pay stations, then spend a
lot more to put the logic inside the enclosure because the LEC
wouldn't provide them with all the end office equal access features.
I think I recall that correctly.
I suspect some small venture capitalists lost their backside in COCOT
ventures. Sort of like Tupperware multipled by a factor of 10, 50, or
perhaps 100.
***** Moderator's Note *****
COCOT vendors used "fortress" phones because they were the least
expensive equipment available when considering that they usually
replaced Ma Bell's own phone, and thus that they had to use the same
mounting, which the COCOT vendor would purchase from Ma Bell in
situ. They usually purchased such phones from OEM companies with logic
already installed, because it was more profitable to use "business"
(e.g., 1MB) lines rather than "pubcom" service (I don't recall the
USOC). One vendor even tried to claim that he should be getting
Centrex rates, with Extensions-off-premise to all his COCOT phones!
The logic inside the COCOT instruments was usually under the control
of the OEM, not the vendor, and the vendors had to pay their suppliers
for every change to the software: every company along the supply chain
wanted to dip their hand into the supposed river of gold on which they
thought Ma Bell had been sailing. They all found out the hard way
that it has always been a low-margin business, but the COCOT vendors
just didn't count on how ornery their customers could be, and how
quickly they would "opt out" of being ripped off.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:11:04 -0800
From: Sam Spade <sam@coldmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Fonts and Editors
Message-ID: <ZU%gn.12111$Ab2.11005@newsfe23.iad>
Neal McLain wrote:
> Sam Spade wrote:
>
>> Bill Gates "[Deity] Complex" notwithstanding, his three programs,
>> Notepad, Wordpad, and even his full-blown word processor program
>> indeed can, and will, work at the basic ASCII level. Problem is,
>> too many users do not get it.
>
>
> Notepad won't correct slanty quotes. Here's a snippet from a Word
> document I received; I copied it into Notepad, then copied the Notepad
> version into this message. If Bill doesn't "correct" it for me, you'll
> see what slanty quotes do:
>
> [quote] Please “don’t be a no show.” [unquote]
>
> Neal McLain
>
> ***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> In case the editor and/or the reader's news/mail client doesn't
> reproduce the quote accurately, or renders the "incorrect" characters
> "correctly", the offending characters have octal values of 223 and
> 224, which are respectively, 147 and 148 decimal.
>
> Those are, of course, the "open quote" and "close quote" characters
> from the Windows-1252 character set. ISO-8859-1 doesn't have an
> equivalent that I could find: it does, however, offer «chevron style
> quotes». C'est la guerre.
Are we now counting angels on the head of a telephonic pin? ;-)
***** Modertor's Note *****
Let's think of it as the Usenet Mesa, instead of the telephonic pin. ;-)
I asked the contributors not to cut-and-paste from sources with
proprietary font codes, since I must edit such things by hand. Someone
else said that Microsoft's low-end text editors could work with
ASCII. Neal pointed out that Microsoft's products work with the
Microsoft character set, and that they will include non-standard
characters in saved files or cut/copied text.
It's an old problem, and we're not going to solve it here. Suffice to
say that ISO-8859-1 is the "standard" character set for the Telecom
Digest.
This is relevent to telecom because we have to agree on a character
set in order to discuss telecom issues. You might not care which
hotel a trade conference is held at, but you'll obviously care that
all the attendees go to the same one.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:51:59 -0500
From: Ron <ron@see.below>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: US school district spied on students through webcams, court told
Message-ID: <6919o5dvk8b54ett3qdpm8uo52innj6fd8@4ax.com>
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
>On Feb 22, 10:03 pm, Ron <r...@see.below> wrote:
>> You are incorrect. There are federal regulations about unlawful
>> interception of Email.
>
> I'm confused--do you mean that an employer does not have the right
> to inspect messages going through his own email system of his
> company on computers he provides on his premises?
The answer is, "it depends". The Electronic Communications Privacy
Act of 1986 has a lot of details about when they may or may not
inspect. If they are providing the mail servers on their own
premises, then the answer is that they probably can monitor. If
they're using a third party, they have more limitations. There's a
good discussion about this at http://www.lectlaw.com/files/emp41.htm
--
Ron
(user telnom.for.plume
in domain antichef.com)
***** Moderator's Note *****
There are some industries - mostly the financial sector - where
employers are required to monitor and even to keep copies of all
employee emails: in Investment Banking, for example, firms have
"blackout" periods for months before a stock is first offered to the
public, and they must record all emails during those times.
Speaking as someone who has had to wade through swamps of both "good"
and "bad" email in order to properly "train" Spamassassin filters, I
can attest to the incredible lack of thought that most corporate
employees put into security. I'm not talking about any "James Bond"
fiction here: I've seen emails between spouses that revealed
fresh-from-the-negotiating-table details about seven-figure RFPs. The
primary focus of those who send such emails seems to be that they're
trying to impress someone who has neither the right, nor the need, to
know anything about the negotiations in the first place, and companies
would obviously be foolish to allow such use.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:57:47 -0800 (PST)
From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Pay phone nostalgia
Message-ID: <de0f69c2-5c5c-4853-aa33-30f02f996838@m37g2000yqf.googlegroups.com>
On Feb 23, 2:26 pm, pv+use...@pobox.com (PV) wrote:
> hanco...@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> > I don't think people minded paying the 50c for a local call.
>
> You would be very, very wrong. Payphones as a market pretty much
> destroyed themselves, cellphones just helped a bit.
>
> As soon as COCOT "money trap" phones started to appear, they were no
> longer trustworthy as a whole, because sometimes the COCOT operators
> worked very hard to make their phones look like telco phones, to the
> point of sometimes using RBOC housings and signage.
You are correct that COCOTs (and alternative operator services
gouging) were a mess. But that is a separate issue from the 50c local
call charge. I submit that if payphones remained as baby bell
property and toll calls from them had reasonable charges, then the
market loss would've been from cell phones.
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:15:03 -0500
From: T <kd1s.nospam@cox.nospam.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Pay phone nostalgia
Message-ID: <MPG.25eeaa0d6ae0bd92989ca1@news.eternal-september.org>
In article <v-idnUgKu_drthnWnZ2dnUVZ_g1i4p2d@supernews.com>,
pv+usenet@pobox.com says...
>
> hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
>
> > I don't think people minded paying the 50c for a local call.
>
> You would be very, very wrong. Payphones as a market pretty much
> destroyed themselves, cellphones just helped a bit.
>
> As soon as COCOT "money trap" phones started to appear, they were no
> longer trustworthy as a whole, because sometimes the COCOT operators
> worked very hard to make their phones look like telco phones, to the
> point of sometimes using RBOC housings and signage.
I've got a good mind to stick my 1D2 on the side of the building and
charge 10 cents a call. Hook it up to a VoIP provider and a basic
controller and I'm golden.
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:57:24 -0800 (PST)
From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: US school district spied on students through webcams, court told
Message-ID: <ed3a86e8-3af7-4b9f-8a85-e774cdc4ca97@g10g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>
On Feb 19, 11:08 am, Monty Solomon <mo...@roscom.com> wrote:
> Pennsylvania district accused of using remote-control laptops to
> photograph teenage students at home without their knowledge
Local news reports as of Wednesday morning, 2/24/10:
Parents from the school district are quoted as being opposed to the
lawsuit and the circumstances in which it was filed.
At a school district meeting the district was not able to say too
much:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_region/20100224_Court_order_limits_talk_of_laptops_at_L__Merion_meeting.html
A local columnist for the Inquirer:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/20100224_Monica_Yant_Kinney__Time_to_cool_L__Merion_s_digital_drama.html
In response to other posters, I believe the student's allegations --
what the administrator may have said to him and what documentation he
may have offered -- have been not confirmed as fact. Rather, they are
the student's own version of the events. News reported also noted
that the parents waited three months after the alleged incident before
filing a Federal lawsuit, and the parents did not notify local, state,
or federal law enforcement officials about the incident.
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End of The Telecom digest (7 messages)
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